On paper, the prospect sounds delirious: a three-hour, $100 million fantasy
epic with massive battle scenes, a cast of non-stars (the closest we come to Hollywood
is Liv Tyler), and a bouquet of disparate landscapes that are neither extant in
the real world nor viable as wholly digital creations. Some of the dialogue is
in Elvish, a lovely language that no one outside of certain convention halls
actually speaks. And all of this action, these characters, this visual majesty
rests on the outsized dramatic and ethical import invested in a small ring, a
circlet of molten iron. How is the screen going to communicate that? (At
least Titanic's blue diamond was
ostentatiously beveled, and seemingly as big as Kate Winslet's head.)

Not a single damn thing about the Lord of the Rings trilogy is
high-concept. You can't sell these movies in a simple tagline ("Will Smith
vs. the aliens,"; "Ben Affleck vs. Tojo," etc.). Even more
dauntingly, the films are awaited by two audiences with entirely different
expectations: the Tolkien fans who have memorized the novels and will not be
satisfied with cowardice or compromises, and the Ignorati like myself who don't
know the books (I'm up to the Gollum sequence in The Hobbit) but need
some real convincing to understand why the Internet has been rattling for all
these months. How wondrous, then, to see a Hollywood studioand not just any
studio, but New Line Cinemas, an outfit forever ensconced on the precipice of
bankruptcyshoot the moon with a blockbuster that demands real
creativity, careful story management, spot-on casting, and unprecedented visual
imagination to capture its audience. And the best news? The movie is a
revelation: the Tolkien mythos and the equally distinctive directorial style of
Peter Jackson have synergized beautifully, instead of just clashing in
fascinating ways like the Kubrick/Spielberg lichen A.I.
Artificial Intelligence. What we have here, folks, is a real goddamned MOVIE.

"The world is changed," announces Cate Blanchett's husky sigh in the
movie's haunting opening narration. "I feel it in the earth, I smell it in
the air," she says, and right away, The Fellowship of the Ring tips
off its viewers to one of the film's unique and galvanizing pleasures. In the
same year that Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within decided that not just
sets and effects but actual actors could be conjured up 2-D, Peter
Jackson has crafted an epic spectacle that relishes its materiality. The
forests, caverns, glades, and fires have been constructed and photographed with
such deep focus and vivid detail that the flat screen can barely contain them.
Check out those palpable grains in Bilbo Baggins' wooden table, the gingery fur
on Frodo's feet, the sooty moisture on the walls of Moriaeverything in The
Fellowship of the Ring has a specific weight and texture that perfectly
suits a tale about an entire planet in genuine physical peril.

In other words, Jackson and his team of collaborators have planted us in a
creative realm completely opposed to the soulless and, to me, ineffective
planes of The Matrix, a film whose alarmist
messages about the end of life as we know it were constantly undermined by its
own full-scale embrace of sleek surfaces, matte projection, CGI graphicsa
world lacking in human or animal thickness. Jackson's
approach, honed by all those Harryhausen tributes in Dead Alive and
Claymation revelries in Heavenly Creatures, couldn't be more different.
When, toward the end of The Fellowship of the Ring, Christopher Lee's
dark lord Saruman starts disintering mud-dripping Orcs from the ground to fight
his battles, Fellowship provides its most fearsome and culminating
vision of a world that has literally seen evil ripped from its soil and turned
back upon itself. It's a terrifying notion but a terrifically compelling
spectacle, precisely because Jackson
takes the conceptual heft of Tolkien's story and the material bulk of his own
creation so seriously. In a different film, the incessant, precipitous plunges
and rapid orbits of Andrew Lesnie's camera would seem grandiose, but Jackson
has pre-empted such objections by creating a world that urgently demands to be
seen.

Amidst this astounding mise-en-scène, the narrative of The Fellowship of the
Ring plays out in tense, front-loaded sections. Blanchett's prologue,
catching us up on centuries of battle and greed, lingers darkly beneath the
idyllic Shire sequence at the film's outset, despite its bright palette of
greens and yellows (more memories of Heavenly Creatures). The first
actors we seeElijah Wood as Frodo, Ian McKellen as Gandalf, and Ian Holm as
Bilbo, all of them born for these rolesengage in a series of affectionate
discursive exchanges that establish the film's belief in male camaraderie. It
is amazing, given the sets and visual surprises, that what really glues us to
these scenes is the talk, thanks to the strong, clear writing and the
earnestness with which the cast animates it.

Even as the characters multiply and the subplots expand, these remain the
cardinal virtues of The Fellowship of the Ring: an exacting, intensive
vision of the physical world, a professional cast dedicated to the emotional stakes
of the plot, and a sustained thematic engagement with the idea of moral
alliance in the face of chaos. Surprisingly, or perhaps not, the Fellowship
that eventually forms around Frodo's personal quest emanates a tougher, more
nuanced example of tense coalition than did Spielberg's all-male cadre in Saving Private Ryan, Ridley Scott's in Black Hawk Down, or even Martin Scorsese's in The
Last Temptation of Christ. Tolkien and his committed interpreters emphasize
throughout that power is contaminating more often than it is elevating, that
teams are constantly vulnerable to the weaknesses of their members. This
viewpoint escapes cynicism because the constant threat of treachery makes the
dedication of Viggo Mortensen's Aragorn (despite his quiet ambivalence about
his own leadership potential) and Sean Astin's Sam (who is, in interesting
ways, in love with Frodo) all the more appreciable. The movie's
characterizations are as sure-footed as its production design.

Only occasionally does the film, speaking of treacheries, betray a reflexive
awareness of its own magnificence. When Sam enters the Dwarf city in the Mines
of Moria and intones, "There's an eye-opener," the screenplay seems
to advertise its images a little too preciously. Smug instances of Hollywood
sloganeering ("Let's hunt some Orc!") are, thankfully, just as rare.
A more lurking problem in Fellowship, though probably endemic to the
demands of an Odyssean plot, is that certain stretches of the plot feel like
compressions of set-pieces with too little connecting material. A chaotic
run-in with a cave troll, for instance, leads instantly into the approach of a
phalanx of Orcs, who retreat to make way for an enormous, horrifying Balrog (a
distant but discernible progeny of the Id Monster in 1956's Forbidden Planet).
Pauses between these episodes, of course, would have accumulated to an
already-robust running time of 178 minutes, but I am convinced that either of
the audiences with whom I've seen The Fellowship of the Ring would have
sat, elatedly, for even longer.

Overall, The Fellowship of the Ring may wind up looking better or worse
once its imminent, already-filmed sequels The Two
Towers and The Return of the King have clarified whether Jackson
can maintain his relentless pace, and whether some enticing cutaways in the
first installmentthe Arwen/Aragorn romance, the accelerated aging of Bilbo,
the comic figures of Pippin and Merryare enriched to the same level as the
more central material. Still, The Fellowship of the Ring is more than an
auspicious start to Jackson's trilogy: it is a cure-all for a year full of
dismal mainstream cinema, a reinvigoration of the flagging fantasy genre, and
an integrated vision of otherworldliness on the order of The Wizard of Oz,
Blade Runner, or 2001: A Space Odyssey.
It fades out on a hero, Frodo, who seems poignantly regretful that he ever
accepted his task. Jackson, thankfully, seems unplagued by such reservations. That such a bold, inventive
artist has embraced the challenge of telling Frodo's story is cause for
celebration. A